This tweet got me thinking a LOT about the ideas it – it’s a tweet so it’s trying to distill a complex argument down into a pithy soundbite. However something about it doesn’t sit quite right with me. This blog post is an attempt to start working out some of those questions and hopefully do so in a space with sufficient space (rather than twitter character limits) to engage in dialogue but also work out the issues at some length.

I want to try and break it down into it’s key aspects the engage with each:

Basic vs Advanced features = not only a false dichotomy but something that doesn’t exist

Instead there’s a new dichotomy proposed of:

Straightforward vs sophisticated uses of tools.

And the straightforwardness or sophistication is to be judged in terms of their “appropriateness for different tasks”.

My key questions therefore are:

On what grounds is the basic vs advanced rejected? Is there alternative evidence to assert this might not be such an easy rejection to defend. (Spoiler: Lots IMHO)

The more complex exploration of how would a judgement of appropriateness be based for considering if you are doing “straightforward” or “more sophisticated” use of tools, and how would those tasks be determined in a way that to me at least reads as being independent of, preceding or separable from the tools?

Fundamentally, I see this as a question of the distribution of agency between

manufacturers and designers of tools,

the tools,

the tasks that can be done, and

the users.

I interpret this formulation as being one that sees or proposes that the agency is (or should be) primarily with the users. Which I further interpret as proposing a new way to (re)configure the user – to draw on Grint and Woolgar’s (1997) conceptualisations.